Have Japanese Millennials Given Up On Sex & Dating?

The country is facing a population crisis ... and a lack of young couples seems to be the cause.

For more and more of Japan's 126 million citizens, sex is apparently "mendokusai" — more trouble than it's worth. The nation is currently facing a population crisis, and things aren't looking good as growing numbers of Japanese are shying away from conventional relationships: According to a survey conducted by Meiji Yasuda Life, a Japanese life insurance company, 30 percent of Japanese men in their 20s and 30s have never even dated a woman. For Japanese women, 30 percent of those in their 20s had no dating experience with men, although that number fell to 15 percent as they entered their 30s.

But it's not just dating that's getting left behind. In a 2012 survey, forty-one percent of marriedcouples reported that they hadn't had sex in a month. That figure actually comes in lower than other estimates, which have posited that between 40 and 50 percent of Japanese marriages are sexless. And things didn't look much better for unmarried couples: 30 percent report not sleeping with their partner in the past month, and only 10 percent had sex more than three times a week.

"Most of the women I see are women who are already married, and who were wither[ing] in sexless relationships even when they were dating, or women who first had sex after they got married and then found that things weren't going well," counselor Dr. Souda Satoru said.

The study comes at a time when Japan's population is declining at huge rates — its population in 2060 is estimated to be 30 percent lower than it was in 2010. And those who are having sex are being really careful about it: Last year's fertility rate (the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime) was 1.41 — a 16-year record high, but a far cry away from the 2.07 needed to just maintain population levels.